Part 3

Farewell, Jackie
by Edward Klein

(Page 3 of 3)

After Onassis died in 1975, Jackie was automatically eligible again to receive the sacraments of the Church. But almost fifteen years after his death, Jackie was still struggling to cleanse her reputation of the tabloid sludge. In 1989, C. David Heymann's best-selling biography A Woman Named Jackie drew a devastating picture of a shallow woman who was obsessed with the material side of life.

Jackie's friends wondered why she wasn't more effective in combating this distorted stereotype. Perhaps the answer lay in her guilty conscience. Strange as it might sound, Jackie sometimes wondered in the presence of friends if she did deserve all the scorn that was being heaped upon her.

As she once told Onassis's sister Artemis: "Sometimes I think that I am responsible for my misfortune. My first husband died in my arms. I was always telling him that he should be protected, but he would not listen to me. Before my second husband died, I was always telling him to take care of himself, but he wouldn't listen to me [either]."

Her friends in Virginia did not recognize Jackie in the media's portrayal of her as a cold, calculating she-monster. They knew her as a tender, warm, and witty woman.

"It's queer how her public persona and her real self are so un-alike," former ambassador to Thailand Charles Whitehouse told the author of this book in 1989, long before Jackie had begun to receive proper credit for her affiliation with the arts, the preservation movement, and the John F. Kennedy Library. "I've given a lot of thought to this, and I think it's because she hasn't become connected in the public mind with any virtuous cause. She's not perceived like Lady Bird Johnson, planting and making things beautiful, or like Barbara Bush with reading. And, you know, being involved with a national problem might have eased Jackie's situation.

"So why doesn't she just do it?" he continued. "It may be connected in some way with her being fiercely independent and not willing to be involved superficially in something just for the sake of the press. Jackie is clearly not gripped by children with rickets. What she is, is a fascinating, somewhat perplexing human being - lively, sporty, affectionate, youthful. Not at all like the acquisitive monster that is portrayed in the press."

"The heavy gray November sky couldn't decide whether to spit snow or rain," recalled one of Jackie's hunting friends.

Jackie and Barbara Graham, along with a field of fifty other riders, moved off, following the hounds, a well-matched pack with white bodies marked with black and brown patches and spots. The hounds dove eagerly into a wooded thicket. They soon found the scent of the fox and were off - tails waving, noses down, howling furiously. Unlike foxhunting in England, the goal of the sport in America was not to kill the creature, just to chase it.

The thundering hooves, the music of the hounds in full cry, and the hunters' horn echoed through the Shenandoah Valley and off the wooded hills. The riders followed closely behind the field master, taking a hefty wall, trying to keep up with the tumbling pack. The countryside was laced with old stone walls and tall post-and-beam chestnut fences, which had been milled before the great chestnut blight at the turn of the twentieth century.

Breathing heavily with excitement, perspiring despite the freezing cold, the riders entered a wooded area, then streamed out of it, one by one, and faced another old stone wall just behind historic Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville. Several of the riders were having trouble negotiating the small wall.

"It was starting to fall down," recalled Barbara Graham. "There were rocks littering the ground in front of it. It wasn't a great approach, so I turned my horse left, riding down the line, to look for a better place to jump."

Barbara glanced over her shoulder to see if Jackie was still with her. But Jackie had fallen back. She was separated by several horses from Barbara, and did not see her friend turn away to find a better jumping spot.

"Jackie's horse took off well back from the wall," Barbara said. "He was trying to avoid the fallen stones, I guess. He basically landed on his nose, and she catapulted right over his head." Jackie hit the ground with a loud thud.

"Oh, my God!" screamed a spectator, "she must have broken her neck."

Barbara and another friend of Jackie's, Ann Tate, instantly dismounted and rushed to Jackie's side, while other riders caught up with her loose horse. The rest of the field streamed away, following the screaming pack of hounds.

"Later, I called Mrs. Mellon and told her what had happened," Barbara said. "I told her that Jackie was unconscious for thirty minutes."

Like many experienced riders, Jackie had taken spills before. As a young woman, she had fallen off a horse and was semiconscious for three days. But today's fall was particularly bad. The accident appeared to be caused by a number of factors other than the condition of the stone wall. To begin with, she was riding an unfamiliar horse who was not entirely under her control during the fast and furious jumps required in the Piedmont-style of hunting. In addition, she seemed to lose her focus at the very moment her horse took off over the wall, perhaps because her mind was on other things. Finally, looking back from the perspective of what we now know about Jackie's health in the fall of 1993, she was clearly in no condition to ride that day.

"I got a call about Jackie from one of her friends who also happened to be my patient," said Dr. Bernard Kruger, a well-known New York cancer specialist. "This patient told me about Jackie's accident, and I said, 'It doesn't sound as though she fell off her horse by accident. If I were her, I'd be concerned about what's going on with my health.'"

*Renard, a fox, is the hero of the French medieval-beast epic Roman de Renart.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Edward Klein is the author of The Kennedy Curse; Farewell, Jackie; and several other New York Times bestsellers. He is also the former foreign editor of Newsweek and former editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. He is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and Parade.